So what is different than Petine from a scheme standpoint.
Pettine vs. Barry? Not as much as you might think. Honestly, there isn't even that much difference between Pettine, Capers, and Barry. Or even Fangio.
The biggest difference in scheme between the three main lines above (Barry's recently been a Fangio line) is what they do with coverage and how they philosophically deploy their schemes.
Capers, being an older coordinator, went through a change while he was our DC. In 2009, we were the number 1 run defense (in terms of yards) but obviously we didn't win it all. In 2010, we were the 18th rushing defense but we won it all. From that point on, Capers had a tendency to favor pass defense over run defense. And honestly, so did Pettine and Barry.
In the front 7/6/5, Capers loved to dip into nickel defense and in my estimation, you'll need Cap to check me, played the most single-high safety looks. Part of that was personnel driven. Woodson, Williams, and Shields were excellent players, so you wanted them on the field all the time. In fact, before Woodson made the switch to safety at the end of his career, Capers drew up a custom scheme with 3 CBs and single Safety to give excellent balance for run vs. pass defense. This was called Corner-Okie ("Okie" was his base 3-4 personnel group. I think there was also "Big Okie," but I don't remember if that was 3 safeties or an extra lineman for goal line.) Where Capers tended to falter was complexity. He had built-in checks, rolls, shifts, etc to counter offensive motions, shifts, and different alignments within the same offensive personnel groupings. It put a lot on (in particular) the Safety to call out checks and responsibilities. If you have less experienced, younger players, this was a recipe for disaster. And it was.
Pettine was honestly similar. He preferred to stop the pass first, loved his nickel defense, but he also tended to shift to dime sooner. He also was primarily a Man to Man secondary. His change vs. Capers was to have simpler, easier to teach and call defenses with the hope of making fewer mental mistakes.
The Barry/Fangio defense also is stop-the-pass first, but they take dealing with the pass to the extreme. The focus is on 2-deep safeties all the time and then rolling coverage after the snap of the ball. 8 man boxes are rare (or 7 man in nickel), sometimes to the point of absurdity. A very zone heavy secondary, it mostly looks like cover-3 to me, but TV coverage is poor and I'm too busy to find, let alone watch, All-22 footage to confirm that. The philosophy is to be okay with medium yards-per carry. Force the offense to go the length of the field, and get cuter and more complicated as the field shrinks and you don't have to worry about deep shots.
In all three approaches, the fronts are largely the same.
